4th Step – Interpretation
We can only interpret something on the basis of a sensual experience stored in the unconscious.
As soon as we perceive something through sensual impulses (light, shapes, colour, sounds, smells or tactile affections) activating our senses, the intellectual interpretation begins involuntarily, i.e. the comparison with an experience once made.
Perceptions that are between the known and the unknown generate particular interest.
Impulse chains that can be immediately assigned are consciously perceived only for a short time. They dissolve in the field of assignment without leaving traces in the memory.
In order to provoke a lasting memory, it is therefore necessary to have a field of tension between what is already assigned in a previous experience and what is unknown.
The unknown knows no cultural classification. The unknown is a meta-cultural quantity that is perceived as a threat both individually and collectively.
There are various cultural methods (or rituals) to eliminate the unknown that endangers us in the form of the unpredictable or incalculable.
One of the most common political claims is that one has the right method to manage the unpredictable.
By the fact that the unpredictable is never found in pure form, but as dark matter or energy that constitutes the predictable in its logical construction, we will be able to predict the predictable causalities, but it will remain impossible to predict what will happen altogether.
The unknown or unpredictable, then, is what we share regardless of our cultural categorisations.
If we see the unknown as the potential of free-flowing causalities, we recognise in the unknown the potential of participatory togetherness.
It is absolutely clear that the problems inherent in society and the system (wars, climate crisis, environmental pollution, species extinction, disintegration of social communities and securities, educational shortage, dismantling of democracy, dictatorships) can only be solved in togetherness and in the consciousness of direct, sensual participation in this world.
Our task as designers is to contribute what we can. One part of this is dealing with the unknown, as is natural for art. Another part, closely related to the other, is the ability to let beautiful stories become sensually true.